Wednesday, June 20, 2018

UAL Service Excellence Award 2018 - Depository and Fulfillment Team

This is a new yearly series on the blog to focus on UAlberta Libraries staff who were nominated for a Service Excellence award. Over the next couple of weeks, we will share the nominees and winners of 2018. Nominees were put forward by fellow staff members and then winners were chosen by an internal committee of peers.

Depository and Fulfillment Team

Winner Service Excellence Award (Team)

Submitted by: CJ De Jong

It is my pleasure to nominate the Depository & Fulfillment Team for the UAL Service Excellence Award. This team has been crucial to the success of the BARD move to RCRF that took place from January 2018 to April 2018.

The team demonstrated excellent service by maintaining access to the collections throughout the entire move, with little to no service disruption for UAL users, NEOS libraries, and external libraries. Logistically, having an active collection that is moving from one building to another across the city, is extremely daunting. An example is the sending of a book out to a user from BARD, then the tray is moved to RCRF, and the book is returned at BARD, which required planning and teamwork to ensure items ended up where they belonged. The team came together by bringing forward solutions to various situations that created barriers to our success.

Servicing two facilities and materials in transit was one challenge, but it was further complicated by the limitation on access to the depository for purposes of retrieval, returns and move preparation, which was restricted to the hours of 8am to 12pm. Adjustments to workflow and schedules was necessary to keep everything moving. Many staff members showed leadership by volunteering to work adjusted hours to either supervise the move by working late or create additional access time to the depositories by coming in early. Others took on supervisory duties, worked on projects that required organizational and problem solving skills, and demonstrated further flexibility by splitting their days between facilities.

This team truly rolled with the punches and stepped up to the plate where needed to ensure that the collection would be fully accessible, and all items could be found for user requests.

Of course, the move started in January, but a lot of preparatory work had to be completed prior to the start of the move. This team carried out numerous projects prior to the move to ensure that the collection would be able to move in the best shape possible. These projects included the relabeling of trays to ensure a consist approach to tray numbers to help identify incorrectly scanned trays, cleaning up data in our systems by checking lists upon lists, and identifying and correcting errors in the collections. The dedication, flexibility, and stamina demonstrated by the team to get us ready for the move, and then see us through, has been incredible.